Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness

Julia Holter has a clever eye for borrowing, stitching together the twisted, gnarled sentences of Virginia Woolf, with the stanzas of flamboyantly life-loving poet Frank O’Hara, Greek Tragedies, and 40s French novellas on previous albums. But, to paraphrase one of Holter’s likely favourites Mrs Dalloway, on ‘Have You In My Wilderness’ she bought the flowers herself. Just as poetic, but rooted in a new, more personal realism, Julia Holter’s voice has never sounded clearer.

In ‘How Long’ Holter’s charmingly specific concerns - “Do you know the proper way to ask for a cigarette?” - meet headlong with vaguely ominous statements about approaching winters and fleeing people. The wash of the sea, cigarettes, and strange ill-fitting opposites like “sun umbrellas” crop up time and time again, too, and it’s the glue holding together the irregular slatted joins of ‘Have You In My Wilderness’. Julia Holter always stood out as a left-field crafter of melody; this album establishes her as a unique lyric voice, too.